We’re thrilled to be named one of six finalists for the Crunchies Awards in the “Best Cloud Service” category. It’s no doubt a tough bracket, full of lots of great companies doing great things in the cloud, from Box and Dropbox to Asana, CloudFlare and Twilio. We’ve no doubt got our work cut out for us. Then again, what could be more important to the future of the cloud than a management layer?
Voting’s live until Sunday, January 29. All it takes is one click!
Customer success is our most important value at Okta, which is why I am very excited today to talk more about the great relationship we have developed with Mike Jennings and his IT team over at LinkedIn.
And the funny thing is it all started with the LinkedIn service – really. We were still early on in the pipeline building and customer acquisition phase of Okta when one of our early reps used LinkedIn to connect to Mike. Nine months later when we were talking about the whole process he let us know that, as obvious as it may seem, it is a real filter he uses when deciding which vendors to talk to. Let’s just say we use LinkedIn pretty extensively for many aspects of our business at Okta from prospecting to recruiting, and it has been great across the board. Continue reading →
From SOPA to Megaupload, there was a lot going on in Internet news last week. Below we’d like to highlight a few of the stories that resonated with us as enterprise cloud users.
The iPad: Ushering in Consumer IT
Last week Sarah Lacy, former senior editor at TechCrunch, launched the startup news site PandoDaily. In one of the first posts on the site, Lacy discusses some of the resistance to enterprise cloud adoption and how the iPad may be changing this. Lacy cites a recent IDG report that found 91 percent of business and IT professionals use iPads for work. Continue reading →
Hindered by weighty and complex legacy systems and infrastructures, healthcare companies are often considered late technology adopters. At Okta, we’ve actually found the opposite to be true. Okta has a strong presence across multiple verticals, including bio/healthcare. Clients like AMAG Pharma, Genomic Health, Cubist Pharma, Alnylam and Trans1 have all moved to the cloud and are innovating IT architecture. This week, we’d like to highlight Veeva Systems, a provider of life science industry applications, from the Okta Application Network.
Founded in 2007, Veeva Systems is now recognized as a leader in multitenant SaaS-based apps for the global life sciences industry. The company serves cloud applications – built specifically for the life sciences industry – with a broad customer base that encompasses some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. Continue reading →
“The cloud will change IT as nothing before it has. It may end up removing the last vestiges of the captive IT organization that “owns” its enterprise as surely as the enterprise owns IT. CIOs are right to start addressing it now.” – The Why of Cloud, Richard Hunter, Gartner Inc., December 2011
For over a decade now I have been working on software and on demand services for enterprise IT organizations. Never have I witnessed something as positively disruptive to IT, both from an operational and leadership perspective, as the cloud. Continue reading →
More on Password Debate
In a piece for Wired, Robert McMillan lays out our long, conflicted relationship with the password. What started as an easy solution to access our lives online has spiraled out of control. We are now forced to remember more passwords than ever, many containing nonsense symbols and a mix of capital letters and numerals. What’s more, security safeguards just don’t cut it anymore. Passwords are often the weakest link in a network, which hackers exploit regularly.
“Passwords have given websites a cheap and relatively secure way to quickly sign up millions of users, but the computer industry needs to treat them with a little more respect,” writes McMillan. Continue reading →
This week, we turn to one of the most innovative cloud vendors in the IT operations market — and, guess what, they’re not a startup. Founded in 2004 and built natively in the cloud, ServiceNow is the first web-based SaaS offering for IT management. Equally as impressive has been the company’s ability to retain its position as a market leader by continuing to impact and evolve the $14 billion IT operations market.
Today, ServiceNow is the fastest growing vendor in its market. The company clocked in at No.5 on Deloitte’s Fast 500 rankings in 2011 of the fastest growing technology companies in the North America. (ServiceNow’s five-year revenue growth of 32,000 percent placed the company first in California.) Continue reading →
The way we work at home is changing.
Back in the day (way back), a typical work day would look something like this: You’d come in to the office, fire up your desktop computer, go get some coffee while you waited the 5 minutes it took for your machine to boot up, sign on to your network, launch some software running on the company’s network, do some work, read a newspaper while you eat your sack lunch in the break room, do some more work, log off, power down your desktop computer (those things used a lot of energy!) then go home and watch the Cosby show. Continue reading →
2012 is little more than a week old, but there’s already been plenty of cloud news. Predictions for 2012 continued to roll in — and not all of them are favorable. Simple cloud management, however, can solve many of the nagging issues that are holding the cloud back. Meanwhile, 45,000 Facebook profiles were compromised, mostly in the U.K. and France. The culprit? Users’ passwords.
Three Ways Cloud Providers Can Screw up in 2012
InfoWorld’s David Linthicum recently posted about three ways cloud providers can “screw up” during 2012. Linthicum pins the potential screw ups to increased tension between hype, demand and growth. Continue reading →
This week, we’d like to share an app from our network that, judging by the flurry of recent help wanted posts on LinkedIn, could be of use to most companies as we kick off 2012. Jobscience is a recruiting and onboarding app that enables companies to easily publicize and accept job applications online. If your company is looking to hire, Jobscience helps streamline the process, letting recruiters quickly manage the recruiting effort.
January 1 means full work weeks for most of us (at least until Presidents’ Day). Travel or no travel, there’s no need to delay recruiting with Jobscience’s iPhone app, which brings the complete applicant tracking system to pocket. Continue reading →